Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The phone rang at the Lisbona home in San Lorenzo,
Argentina.Introducing himself as Father
Bergoglio, the caller asked to speak with Jaqui regarding the letter she had
written him.As reported in the Washington
Post, she took the phone and had a ten-minute conversation with the priest
known to most of us as Pope Francis. The
Vatican confirmed the conversation took place.Communion was being withheld from this devout couple because Mr. Lisbona
had previously been married; the Church doesn’t condone divorce. Jaqui had hoped Francis might intervene on
their behalf.As important as this
is to them and other Catholics, that’s not what caught my attention.

What struck me was how unimaginable a similar call to
some German town by a man introducing himself as Father Ratzinger.Both men were elevated by their peers
to the papacy, but they could not be more stylistically different.The now retired Benedict approached the
throne of St. Peter as a monarch.He
quickly took up residence in the opulent papal palace, donned the royal red
shoes and was bedecked in an elaborately embroidered stole and ermine trimmed
velvet cape. Francis opted for a Vatican
guesthouse and refused those red slippers.Ermine trimming just doesn’t work for a man who prefers the ride of a
five year old Ford
Focus over a posh limo; a man who makes pastoral phone calls to an ordinary
parishioner in Argentina.

I use the word “stylistically” purposefully because
with just one year in one can’t make definitive judgments about Francis.His call and shunning of opulence
notwithstanding, there is no reason to assume that this pope will part
doctrinally from his immediate predecessors.Nonetheless, it’s clear that he understands the grand gesture and its

Saint
Peter, by Rubens (Wikipedia)

newsworthiness.
Francis’ grandest gesture thus far was
the unprecedented concurrent canonization of two predecessor popes, John XXIII
and John Paul II: a very dramatic double header.Many early popes, starting with Peter, achieved sainthood. But only five
others have been canonized in the last thousand years.While the elevation of these two men was
certainly not unexpected, doing it in this way has led to wide ranging
speculation.Was it meant to make a
statement?Was it aimed at bridging
right and left?

That right/left question is of course what seems to
have gotten the most attention.John XXIII, in many
ways an unlikely and surprise pope — he was considered elderly and it took eleven
ballots to select him — is seen as the great reformer.His views, which some characterize as liberal,
were codified in Vatican II.John Paul
II, at heart and in action more of a traditionalist, has been seen as having
spent much of his papacy pulling back from those reforms.Regardless, the Church like many other
institutions religious and not, seems at times to be internally torn apart by
the conflicting “sides”— reformers vs.
traditionalists.By canonizing both John
and John Paul together, Francis is seen as seeking
to bridge the gap, the conciliator if you will.And as to dramatic gestures, being joined by the Pope Emeritus only adds
to the symbolism.Benedict, a pope in
the spirit of John Paul; Francis, a reincarnation of the modest “good pope” John.Interesting, but again not what caught my
attention.

As noted in earlier posts, we — Catholics and not —
are endlessly fascinated by the goings on in Rome.The church, with its splendor, pageantry and machinations
is the stuff of novels.Most of all, it is
a highly charged political animal.Perhaps that’s inevitable when an organization is structured with tiers
of power all leading to the potential of ascending to a throne of infallibility
and absolute power.For sure, most of its
clergy are not ambitious climbers, but there is an implied — and for some real
— race for higher ground.We are
fascinated, not because we are attracted to or even interested in the Catholic
faith, but because in a profound sense the church as a political phenomenon is so
much like us.It reflects the human
drama that commands our daily attention whether in the halls of government or in
the corporations that dominate our economy.

There has been relatively little controversy about
John XXIII’s sainthood. The same cannot
be said for John Paul II.In a long
reign, which he had, the narrative can change.In his early years the first Polish pope was seen almost as a rock star
with a frenetic road show that attracted huge crowds across the globe.But in his rule, John Paul was ideologically conservative
on issues like contraception, abortion and the role of women.But these views were not what caused some to
question his canonization.Rather it was
the sex abuse scandal — both predator priests and institutional cover-up — that
came to light under his watch and his lack of response.

The stunning breadth of abuse cases and worse the Church’s
cover-up outraged many of us, but clearly none more than those (including
journalists) who had been brought up Catholic.Maureen Dowd is among them; one who still attends church from time to
time.Dowd’s NY Times columns often strike a seemingly frivolous note, but when
addressing this subject she is consistently serious, resolute and, yes, angry.This was the case on April
23 when she addressed the impending elevation of John Paul.Here is some of what she wrote:

John Paul was a charmer, and a great man in many ways. But given that he presided over the Catholic
Church during nearly three decades of a gruesome pedophilia scandal and
grotesque cover-up, he ain’t no saint. One of John Paul’s great shames was giving
Vatican sanctuary to Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, a horrendous enabler of
child abuse who resigned in disgrace in 2002 as archbishop of Boston. Another
unforgivable breach was the pope’s stubborn defense of the dastardly Mexican priest
Marcial Maciel Degollado, a pedophile, womanizer, embezzler and drug addict. The world has seen many saints, some of them
canonized by the Catholic Church, but John Paul II was not one of them.It is wonderful that John Paul told other
societies, Communist and capitalist, to repent.But his tragedy is that he never corrected the failings of his own
society, over which he ruled absolutely.

Tough criticism.The Church defends John Paul.It was
reported
that his former spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, told journalists “that the ‘purity
of his thought’ had made it difficult for the pontiff to accept that priests
could abuse children”.Dowd doesn’t buy
such an argument, nor do I.You won’t
find a volume Being Pope for Dummies
at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.It
takes a sharp and focused mind to climb the ladder to the papacy and, as Dowd
might put it, John Paul “wasn’t no dummy”.At this point, we may just remember the frail old man with severe
Parkinson’s, but John Paul took over at a vigorous 58 years old.He was an activist and nothing missed his
attention. So one can only conclude that
his and the church leadership’s decision to avert their eyes was
calculated.Cover-ups are always that
way, even if the perpetrators are deceiving themselves.

Putting this in a broader context, and the last and
most important thing that caught my attention, comes toward the end of Maureen
Dowd’s piece.“The church”, she says, “is
giving its biggest prize to the person who could have fixed the spreading stain
and did nothing. The buck, or in this case, the Communion wafer, doesn’t stop
here.”I said earlier that what
intrigues us about the Roman Church is that it mirrors the larger society —
political entities and corporations.Is
there any greater link than the “buck…doesn’t stop here”? We have been through some terrible times of
late and perhaps worst among them is that the buck doesn’t seem to stop anywhere,
least of all at the top.John Paul II
hasn’t had to take responsibility or to pay for perhaps his greatest management
failure.Sound familiar?None of those who had the power and could
have made a difference — politicians, regulators, and corporate executives —
have had to pay for what was done to all of us either.Like the late pope, they have just cashed in
at a saintly sum.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The envelope was in my mailbox, the return address:
“Ready for Hillary 2016”.My immediate response:
not so much — certainly not yet.Beyond
all else, I am so not ready for two and a half protracted years of presidential
politics. More important, we’re facing a
critical Congressional election this November.So I see this solicitation as a distraction at the very moment when we
can ill afford to avert our attention from the immediate task at hand.Do her supporters not realize how important it
is to hold the Senate; are they intentionally trying to undermine our sitting Democratic
president? The promised “photo enclosed”
pictured the presumptive first family: Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton,
another reason I’m feeling, not so much.Let me explain.

Don’t get me wrong; if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic
nominee in 2016 I will certainly vote for her.At the moment, the odds are in her favor and she may well land in the Oval
Office this time around.Like others
back In 2008 I faced a very hard choice.I had long been deeply committed to both civil and women’s rights.The prospect of finally having either an
African American or a woman in the White House was nothing less than exciting.I opted for Barack Obama, a choice actually
made on the night he spoke at Kerry’s 2004 convention.I didn’t regret it in the many months that
followed and still don’t.Hillary Clinton
was a credentialed and compelling candidate.My problem was that her campaign had an air of entitlement, an assumption
that she would rightfully sail to
victory.That was a turnoff, but there
was something more.Having lived through
the two Bush presidencies I was troubled by the idea of dynasty.Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton didn’t sit well
with me then, nor does it today.

While we’ve not had husband and wife presidents, we have
had father and son — John and John Quincy Adams.Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt were cousins; Benjamin
Harrison was William Henry Harrison’s grandson.The Roosevelt’s were two of our greatest chief executives. Regardless,
these dynasties went against the intent of the Founders who were averse to
anything that smacked of monarchy.His
distaste for royalty, led George Washington to shun a third term.After Franklin Roosevelt took four and died
in office, term limits were imposed. I
have always been a proponent of them and wish they would, in some fashion,
apply across the board including the Supreme Court.

I admit that my own aversion to dynasties is
especially acute these days.With each
passing year, and contrary to what one might hope in an age of hyper
communication, America is becoming much more stratified, sharply divided by
class.We like to talk about the
oligarchs of Russia and China, but we have as many, even more, of them right
here.Perhaps they didn’t derive their
position from the same corrupt transfer of wealth, but some would argue that
our stunning income inequality stems from its own kind of corruption.Think obscene CEO pay.Parallel to the concentration of wealth — the
1% — we have an entrenched political class and the two have developed a
symbiotic relationship grounded in mutual interest.Political dynasties, of which there are many,
fit neatly into that picture.

Our Oligarchs generally stand in the shadows as political
funders, though one of their own, Michael Blumberg served as a three-term mayor
of New York.Note he circumvented an enacted
two-term limit.The political
class takes on the role of governing and they are remarkably inbred, even if
not always by blood.For many, politics
is a family business; the Kennedy’s being the best known in our time.It’s not accidental that we often refer to
these families as “royalty”.Altogether,
it’s a system that belies the romantic notion of a people’s democracy with a
level playing field much as it does the myth that anyone in America can make
it.Wealth and politics are incestuous
and the dynasties are manifestations of that relationship.And speaking of Hillary, the wealthy and the
political often merge so that at times it’s hard to tell them apart.The Clintons came to Washington as a family
of modest means — they weren’t even homeowners.Bill left office a little better off thanks to his wife’s best selling
book, but in the intervening years he has pursued wealth
big time.He has also courted and
befriended the oligarchs, or at least the relatively progressive ones.

Does wealth disqualify Ms. Clinton from the presidency?Certainly not.Will it make her more independent, less
dependent on the funding rich?Don’t
count on that. In fact she may be less
likely to pitch in her own funds than in 2008.And I say her own funds (vs. family funds) because it
is reported that she is commanding hefty — $200 K plus expenses a pop —
lecture fees.If that isn’t an outlier relative
to the average American (even the well compensated ones) on whose votes she
depends, I don’t know what is.Again,
wealth — in this case earned wealth —
shouldn’t be held against her, but these fees for a few hours work are no less
unseemly than the executive pay about which I wrote earlier this year.Do they spell quid pro quo?Who knows, but on the other side you can be
sure the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson (before whom GOP contenders
recently genuflected) are surely expecting something in return.

I said earlier that the Hillary mailing was distracting.Worse is that the assumption of her unannounced
candidacy is so preemptive that no other Democrats dare even voice an interest
in the office.With a second term
incumbent in the White House, parties always find themselves with a relatively
thin and certainly untested bench.That’s why they often defer to the Vice President — GHW Bush and Al
Gore.It accounts for some Biden talk
this time around.To be sure, the
Democrats have a good number of talented office holders, but virtually all of
them are boxed in.Perhaps the best
example is Governor Andrew Cuomo (scion of another dynasty), who must hold
back because New York is now Hillary’s home state and she is his political senior.Until the former Senator and State Secretary
announces her intention everything and everyone on hold. Long term, that can’t be good for the party or the country.

While we all wait — possible candidates, party activists
and citizens — the press is obsessed with Hillary.They eagarly
await her forthcoming book, which will be heavily promoted.Frank Rich has
written a NY Magazine story that presupposes her nomination and the expected
Republican response.Earlier this month
the New York Times’ Mark Landler and Amy Chozick’s offered an assessment of her
State
Department legacy and how it might play in an expected run.As important as the dynasty issues, there are
probably much more important questions about what kind of president Ms. Clinton
might be?In that context, along with
considering her own record, people speculate about how she might have addressed
the issues faced by Obama.She was
widely respected in the Senate, and certainly was an energetic State
Secretary.She traveled widely, but
it’s hard to pinpoint what she accomplished other than as part of the
administration.Her record will
inevitably be compared to that of John Kerry.His successes could put her at a disadvantage, but it’s too early to
judge.All indications are that she
came down on the side of hawkishness during internal policy debates, often
ending up in the minority.Indeed her
original support of the Iraq war probably reflects and overall ideology that
differs from what has come to be Obama policy.That concerns me.

In recent weeks there has
been more talk, along with the expected articles, about a Jeb Bush run for the
presidency.Wow, a real head-to-head
Clinton-Bush.Jeb’s mother has famously spoken
out against his candidacy, but political families do change their minds.Conservatives who now control the Republican
grassroots don’t trust the Bushes nor do they see Jeb as one of them.Given their acquiescing to two perceived “moderates”
— McCain and Romney — both of whom lost badly in the general election don’t be
surprised if they insist on nominating a “real conservative”, say Rand Paul.With much of the electorate, though you wouldn’t know it, moving in the
other direction that could be suicidal.At this point, as concerned as I am about 2014, I don’t feel projecting
a Democratic victory in 2016 is just wishful thinking. So thinking seriously about Hillary, albeit
being forced to do it prematurely, makes sense.And the bottom line is that at this moment she gives me pause.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

We watched Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration with
great expectations.In retrospect, I’d
suggest totally unrealistic though not surprising expectations. We were desperate, fatigued and
disillusioned.An administration's purposeful terror
mongering used to launch two questionable, costly and unfunded wars had done a
number on our national psyche.Our
standing in the world was at a low — yes at a low in the Bush years — and the
bottom had fallen out of our over leveraged economy.With this backdrop came a tall handsome
knight in shining armor, a man of soaring speech with the ability to attract
and move enormous crowds.He spoke of
the change for which we hungered and we invested heavily in his and its promise.And so was he (perhaps also unrealistically),
“fired up and ready to go”.

The late Mayor Ed Koch would go around New York asking
citizens, “How am I doing?”With more
than five years logged into his presidency, its seems a good time to assess how
Obama is doing, most especially for those of us who supported him in ‘08 and
still do.Lets stipulate that he was
dealt a terrible, almost unprecedented, hand.While that explains a lot, it’s time to stop invoking the inherited
Great Recession and unresolved wars.No
doubt, Obama’s performance has been impacted by the starting gate, but this far
in we judge presidents for their performance not for their handicap entering
the game.

Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign will go down as a
watershed in American politics.It
raised record dollars, a good deal of it at the grassroots level, and was the
first to engage the full power of technology.What was put in place then paid dividends four years later, giving the
president a decisive second term win. There
is a vast difference between campaigning and governing.As if to underscore that point, the
organization and methods that work in building election victories don’t
necessarily do as well in support of governance or policy.Obama’s organization, albeit rebranded, kept
going throughout his first term and continues today, but has not been able to sufficiently
mobilize positive public opinion on his most important initiatives.Beyond that, making speeches as a candidate —
or making speeches in general — is far easier than executing.Speeches are solo acts where one is virtually
in full control. Executing effectively
requires teamwork and a large degree of consensus building, often with people of
contrary views.Speeches can be pure;
the product of the legislative process and even of executive action is almost
always just the opposite. It is messy
and often results in painful compromise.

How is Obama doing?Not as well as his campaign speeches might suggest and certainly not up
to our expectations of him at the start.There are of course many reasons, including not inconsequentially that
difference between campaigning and governing.That he has had to contend with an inordinately hostile opposition,
exacerbated by the issue of race discussed in my last post, has only added to
whatever underperformance we might attribute to him.During the heat of the '08 primary campaign,
Hilary Clinton ran her famous 3 AM Ad suggesting that
Obama was ill prepared for the sudden crisis that face all presidents.Other contenders, contrasting themselves with
the inexperienced freshman senator, claimed their readiness ”on day one”.I’m not sure that even the most seasoned
politician is truly ready for the very different and unique challenges that
face presidents.Even so, Obama came
with very limited Washington and executive experience. These deficiencies clearly put him at some
disadvantage.

Obama is almost unmatched in speaking to and firing
up crowds.He is less so in smaller
settings and, if press reports are accurate, in the one-on-one exchanges with
politicians in either party required to get things done in DC.For a man who has come so far so fast, he is
not a natural (backslapping) politician.Despite his campaign’s phenomenal success in mobilizing the grass roots,
Obama falls short at retail politics.Part of that may be because the president for all his public exposure is
at heart a private person, a man with a very small close knit set of friends who
is most at home, literally and figuratively, with his immediate family.Superficial engagement just isn’t his cup of
tea.Early on, people on the Hill have
complained that he doesn’t socialize or build personal relationships with
them.This probably hurt his presidency,
though in the current hostile and poisonous environment, it’s hard to say how
much.

One of the ironies of Obama’s tenure is that what
will probably be his greatest domestic accomplishment is also the source of
what has weakened him most.Most
troubling is that it has been a largely self-inflicted wound, and a mystifying
one at that.With two years to get
prepared, the administration bungled the launch of his signature healthcare
program.While new websites, especially
those that have to deliver on very complicated functionality, can face
glitches, the ACA’s breakdown was inexcusable.In the end it was, as many of us predicted, fixed.Enrollment actually exceeded original
targets.But the damage the initial cock-up inflicted on the Obama presidency may have been catastrophic.If the Senate is lost in November, the ACA’s inept
rollout will probably be to blame.Republican
control of both houses in this environment would mean his presidency will effectively be over.

Many of Obama’s strongest supporters expected a far
more liberal president.In part that disappointment
comes more from their hopes and expectations than from what he had
promised.Obama’s rhetoric has always been
that of a progressive moderate, more of the center than of the left.The country’s right tilt just doesn’t produce
many left-liberal politicians, certainly not nationally successful ones.Nonetheless, he promised to close Gitmo (yet
to be done) and his rhetoric certainly did not foretell the NSA intrusions, the
crackdown of leaks and the deporting of so many of the undocumented immigrants.Perhaps Democratic presidents have to prove
their national security bona fides, but that doesn’t compensate for our
disappointment.So, we can’t give him a
pass.

In the aftermath of Viet Nam, America went through a
period of military humility, even shell shock. George HW Bush’s first Gulf War — short and
successful — probably turned that around.The hubristic aggressiveness of his son swung the pendulum too far,
reawakening our post Viet Nam mindset.People like John McCain haven’t gotten that message, or refuse to hear
it. Obama does.He understands the public’s appetite for
interventionism is limited, probably nonexistent.So he has been reluctant to engage in other
people’s conflicts (often civil wars) and, in my view, correctly so.The idea that his policies have weakened
America is preposterous.As said
earlier, our standing in the world had already taken a huge hit in the Bush
years, and in part because of them.But
perhaps more important is that while we may still be the preeminent super
power, the world has changed drastically.The idea that there can be a single center of gravity no longer obtains
in the 21st Century.

To be sure, Obama’s approach to foreign policy has
been cautious, and his administration like others before it, has made some
mistakes.For all our clout around the
world, we remain a very insular nation with often dangerously limited
understanding of other countries and cultures.Obama’s caution in part stems from understanding that, as with the
presidency itself, his (and our) power is greater in theory than reality.He also seems at times to be torn between his
own restraint instincts and the pressure of others (including some Democrats) to act, to
do more.So he has drawn “red lines”
which made no sense at the start and, once abandoned, have dismayed some at home
and abroad.Those are valid criticism,
but in truth our record of intervention is at best spotty.War didn’t work in Viet Nam and yielded
precious little in Iraq and Afghanistan — all three with huge and long felt
costs.Can we do better with
negotiations?The jury is still out on
Iran and most certainly on Israel-Palestine, but I’m inclined to believe the
outcomes are likely to be better, certainly measured against cost-benefit.

Obama, like each of his predecessors, has had some
substantial failures.That presidents
can fulfill our unfettered hopes is a myth, much like the idea that we are “the
greatest”.But in addition to Affordable
Care Act, the president has had some notable accomplishments.The economy remains challenging in part
because some of the problems that remain are systemic rather than tied to a
normal cycle.That said, the recession
didn’t morph into a depression and millions of new jobs have been created.Progress, albeit less than we’d like, has
been made at financial reform.Dodd-Frank is making a difference, some of it yet to take full
force.Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has been repealed and marriage equality (with
the President’s full support) is on its way to becoming a national
reality.Some believe too many people remain,
but we have ended our military role and have exited Iraq; Afghanistan will
follow this year.

Have our expectations of an Obama presidency been
met?Perhaps not entirely, but relative
to what we experienced in the previous eight years — yes they have.Our country faces some huge problems, some
shared with others around the world.Writing this post from Manhattan where income inequality hits you in the
face everywhere you look, fixing the disparity seems all the more urgent.We can’t go on like this, certainly not
without major social upheaval.Obama is talking about it, pressing for raising
the minimum wage, but much more concrete action will be required.We’ve lived through a weird weather year,
seasons not behaving in the expected manner, and still are not doing nearly
enough to address (even in conversation) the environmental crisis.Even if Obama focuses on nothing else in his
remaining time it won’t be enough, but he should try.I think he knows that.

I don’t know who will sit in the Oval Office on
January 20, 2017.Whoever it is, she or
he should be grateful that Barack Obama kept the place going and led this
nation.The hand they will be dealt
won’t be a cakewalk, but it’s sure to be far better than what he faced eight years earlier.Yes, the presidency comes with
considerable power, but in many ways it’s a miserable, unpredictable and often thankless
job.This critical assessment
notwithstanding, I’m so glad Obama took it on and remain proud to say he’s my
president, our president.

Friday, April 4, 2014

As Barack Obama raised his hand to take the oath in
2009, he stood before the largest crowd ever assembled for an event in
Washington DC.The estimated 1.8 Million
that gathered on that day easily broke the previous record (1.2 M for LBJ) and was
seven times larger than the 1963 March on Washington (250K), a record in its
time. Millions more of us were glued to
our television screens in rapt attention.It was an exciting moment filled with emotion and historic consequence,
but also one accompanied by an element of disbelief.

That may have been especially so for those of us with
a history in Civil Rights struggles, but probably no less for those who had
worked so hard on a campaign that Obama often characterized as “unlikely”.There he was, a black president — our
president — and we were figuratively or literally pinching ourselves to make
sure that it wasn’t all a dream.Could
it be, and so relatively soon since King’s iconic speech and the struggle that often
seemed insurmountable? OMG, we had
elected an inaugurated a black president.What a great day, how very far we had all come.

We were hardly alone in expressing that OMG, but not
everyone saw it in a positive way.Far
from considering it a great day, a significant number of Americans saw January
20, 2009 as unnerving, horrific and even catastrophic.They too watched in disbelief, bearing witness
to their rightful order, the one on
which they counted, evaporating before their eyes.Would it have happened if not for our
collective war fatigue and a near financial collapse in an election year?Let’s leave that to historians, but for sure
Obama’s election did not fit the plan nor
did it reflect the rightward direction in which the country had been heading for
more than four decades.

Many of those who now felt disenfranchised saw Obama
as an illegitimate president, someone who in their mind was not even
American.What he called his “funny
name” was indeed alien, even his claimed Christian faith suspect.As I’ve suggested before, for many Obama
typifies the other, someone “not like
us”.He personifies a potential and
threatening sea change, a transfer of power away from the “entitled”.And much, if not all of this unease, centers
on a single word: race.If these last five
plus years have proven anything, it is that any notion of a post-racial America
was always a dream, and a naïve one at that.

It’s been many weeks since I’ve written a post. Much of this quiet time has been spent trying to make some sense of the mess in
which we find ourselves on so many fronts, domestic and foreign.It’s a crazy idea but I’ve been trying to
think before writing.In much of that
time, the title of this blog has been sitting atop an otherwise blank Word
document.In thinking ahead to the
coming elections and about these last years of political acrimony and gridlock,
the idea of “OMG, A Black President” just wouldn’t leave my mind.Was I being irrational, wrongly obsessed with
how race was playing out before us?Well, thanks to my friend Eric Dashman the answer, the confirmation of
sanity, came in alerting me to Bill Moyers’ interview of law professor Ian
Haney Lopez.Lopez, discussing his
recently published book, was saying all the things I was thinking and more
important making a compelling case for what ails our country, and why.

Dog
Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial
Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class was on my iPad
within minutes of watching the interview.I couldn’t put it down.Lopez’
title was inspired by a simple device that we humans can see, but that can be heard
and understood only by dogs.Dog
whistles speak in a special code and
so too do the metaphoric racial political dog whistles employed by the
politicians and opinion makers who use them.These are suggestive messages, rich in innuendo and aimed at specific
target audiences. But, as Lopez
suggests, it doesn’t take much for all of us to understand their meaning. We have come to understand the buzzwords and
images, and they have had a cumulative effect in drawing and reinforcing the
lines that so divide us. When Mitt Romney
spoke of the 47%, we instinctively knew their identity.We understand the underlying meaning of the “takers”
— recipients of food stamps, Medicaid, and even public education.Conversely, we recognize who falls under the
definition of “hard working American taxpayers” and who does not.Race is writ large in these coded words.

I won’t attempt to more than skim Lopez’s case here
— you should read it.His story begins
with the prescient, albeit unsuccessful, campaign of Barry Goldwater and takes
firm hold a mere four years later with Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy.Beyond
all else, this is a perception game, one premised on a simple strategy of steering
white voters toward a common self-preservation cause under the umbrella of their (White Republican) party.It has been remarkably successful not only in
determining the priorities and direction of the GOP, but also in influencing
the conversation and ultimately policy across the entire political
landscape.Republicans turned increasingly
(hard) right but so, to some significant degree, have Democrats (especially since
Clinton) followed along, abandoning liberalism for something right of
center.A striking outcome of Dog
Whistle Politics is that since 1960 Republicans have garnered a plurality and usually
a majority of white voters in all but one presidential election cycle.

What was implied in Nixon’s Southern Strategy became
more blatant with Reagan’s talk of “Welfare Queens” and George HW Bush’s racially
infused Willy Horton commercial in 1988. To get a sense of how intrusive this has been,
Bill Clinton, who has been called our first “black president”, made much of his
presidential legacy about “ending Welfare as we know it”.The reform
was premised on the idea that “lazy” recipients need to be forced off the
government tit and into the
workforce.And who are these
people?Mostly shiftless black recipients, people who prefer gaming the system
rather than being productive — read, being hard
working taxpayers.An assault on public
sector unions/employees, including teachers who serve the same disadvantaged
citizens, is only a different side of the same coin.

In 1965 President Johnson signed Title XVIII of the
Social Security Act providing universal healthcare for America’s seniors.For sure Medicare had its detractors including
those who saw it as socialized
medicine.But no one ever called it Johnsoncare; no one tried to turn the
president’s name into an epithet.In attacking
the Affordable Care Act and pejoratively branding it Obamacare, we can see a striking example of the dog whistle.As Lopez writes, “here comes a black man to
get government involved raising taxes on you in order to fund even more
giveaways to minorities.”More
specifically, “…Obama cares about minority loafers and not white taxpayers”.

The wave of new voter ID laws being passed in the
very states where poll taxes and bogus qualification “tests” were used to
subvert and prevent African American participation may now be aimed at
suppressing Democratic votes, but only the blind can miss its larger racial
component, one that also impacts Latinos.“Voter fraud” is the dog whistle code for keeping the right people
(Republicans and by extension whites) in power.

Today’s heightened role of race in politics
correlates directly to America’s dramatic demographic shift.Whites are on their way to losing numerical
preeminence.Having a black president
just rubs salt into the festering wound of feared power loss.Whether that loss will occur and when is
still a mater of conjecture.Lopez
believes that Republicans are likely to coopt second and third generation
Latinos into the white fold,
something that might turn the projected demographic shift on its head.Some light skin blacks “passed” in an earlier
time. Accent free citizens of Hispanic heritage can easily meld into the
“white” population totally unnoticed.Some already have. In a cautionary message, Lopez sees
this as a likely “solution” to the GOP’s demographic dilemma.

The point is that there are lots of potential
weapons in the arsenal of those who seek to turn back the clock.What I find most disturbing is that those
using those weapons, the whistle blowers, have been very successful in coopting
others, sometimes unwittingly, to their cause.Considering how transparent the pejorative use of Obamacare, it is
shocking to see the likes of the NY Times and NPR being subverted into playing
along.More telling is that Obama and his
Administration have fallen into the same perilous trap.

Barack Obama is our first black president, an
accomplishment that undoubtedly makes him acutely aware of how race plays out
in this country.What Ian Lopez contends
is not new to him.But race, perhaps
especially to him, is a sensitive and conflicting subject.On the one hand, one might expect the
president’s voice to be raised against dog whistle politics and its use as a corrosive
weapon of civic destruction.On the
other, he carries the burden of any groundbreaker, one familiar to other first
of their kind: African Americans, women and in another generation to Catholics
like Kennedy and Jews like Louis Brandeis. In fact, Obama is probably the least able to
take on the race fight, certainly not with any regularity and consistency.Like other pioneers before him, his first
priority is to prove that someone like him can perform equal to, or ideally
better, than any “more likely” counterparts.His identity is, if you will, the cause of the perceived problem and carrying the anti-racist
flag would only be reconfirm the dog whistle blowers’ contention — “what can
you expect, we told you so”.Put simply,
it’s up to many of us to combat the dog whistle, and it’s on us that it remains
so powerful.How Obama is doing the job
he was elected to do is another and important question, the subject of my next
post.

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About Me

A branding consultant with decades of experience working with large global clients and brands, he now serves primarily young startup companies. Beginning his professional life as a rabbi of a large urban congregation, he has watched the numbers of the religiously unaffiliated grow in the years since leaving the pulpit. His book, Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars (available on Amazon) considers this phenomenon. Beyond his consulting practice Prinz spends much of his time writing, including this Blog. He posts to "Beyond All That" only when there is something to say that might add value to the conversation.